One of the most important lessons that you will ever learn is that business is just business, it’s not personal.
It will feel personal and you will want it to be personal, especially in the early days when you start. Trust me, I know because I’ve been there and I’ve done that. But the sooner you can learn that business is not personal and you can learn to separate your emotions, the better it’ll be.
Now I learned this lesson the really hard way around 16 years ago, and I’m going to share my story and my experiences in the hope that you’ll learn from it.
I have a feeling that most people need to also learn this lesson the hard way. However, me sharing my experiences might help you.
If I take you back, about 16, 17 years ago, I had a product called the Ultimate Crafter’s Companion. It was our most famous product, it was ten crafting tools all in one and as part of that included our Enveloper which is the product that I have patented.
Now it was a really successful product for us, we did a lovely big launch and it was all great. However, if you can you remember, the stationery company Helix (when you were at school you probably had pencil case and it’ll have had a Helix ruler and protractor and compass and things like that in) well they’d obviously made a decision to diversify into the craft market.
So, as any company would, and I can say this now in black and white because I’ve been through it, but they had looked at what was out there in the craft market, looked at the tools and where they could excel, saw that I had this product, thought ‘that’s a great idea – we’ll do our own version of this and we’ll just make sure that we design around her intellectual property’.
I had design registrations, trademarks, I had the patent on the Enveloper the side of it, and you could see from the design of their product that they just designed around it. They even had the audacity to invite me down to their office to talk about my product and potentially working with them for them to distribute it to find out everything about it. And being naive little Sara, I tattled down to their office and told them all about the product. Then, six months later, I see them launching their own version, which is, to anybody in the market, a blatant rip-off of my product.
Now, I took that really personally, especially because I’d met them and invited me to my offices, it felt very immoral.
I feel like they probably just looked at me and thought, ‘she’s just a young girl with a little business, she’s no risk to us we can probably push it a little bit on, you know, where we might be infringing certain parts of our intellectual property and that would be fine, right?’. And it wasn’t fine. I wasn’t having any of it. And, but because I let my emotions take over, as soon as I saw what they’d done, I was on the phone with my solicitor, I was having them fire off a threatening letter saying we’re going to take it to court, you’ve infringed our intellectual property.
It’s a very long story, how they retaliated and how we went on and we ended up in mediation and at the time I was spending tens of thousands of pounds on that one legal case.
Now thankfully for me, it worked out well.
We settled and we went through mediation in the end, the settlement was favourable for what I wanted, they withdrew the product, they had to serve up all of the Envelopers to me. So I got what I wanted out of that.
However, I learned the valuable lesson in that nobody at Helix had said ‘right look at her let’s take her on let’s have her just for fun just because it’ll wind her up’. They had literally looked at the markers thought there’s a great product, there’s an area we can move into, assessed my intellectual property portfolio, deemed that it was low risk, made a decision – this is what we’ll do.
It wasn’t personal, it was a carefully calculated set of business decisions for that company. But for me, it felt personal. I felt like they were attacking me and they were attacking my product.
And I think I can reflect on it now all of these years later and it was probably the most stressful time of my life if I’m being really honest. I was only 23 years old at the time I was going through you know I was up and down to London like a yo-yo, I was in court, we were paying legal fees up and down the yin yang it was it was horrific but I jumped into that because my heart said that I should right.
I have now successfully defended that patent six times.
For the five subsequent times, what I did is I made a calculated decision. What is the risk? What is this potentially going to cost me? What is the return for me to do this? And should I now go and pursue a legal case here? Each time this is the checklist that we go through. I don’t let my emotions make the decision. The heart rules – not the head.
It’s a really difficult one. I want to share that story with everybody and I hear from a lot of other entrepreneurs and see it in the Den a lot. With people who have big intellectual property, there is always the risk that someone’s going to knock off your product.
And you’ve got to look at how am I going to protect myself and am I able to protect myself? Now, the big takeaways in this one – don’t let your emotions cloud your business judgement. Don’t ever let that happen and you need to constantly keep yourself in check and put people around you who will keep that in check.
Then, and this is so important, do what is right for the business, not what is right for your ego. Ego is quite a strong word and a lot of people don’t like it when we start throwing around ego, but when you let your heart rule your head, that’s your ego taking over.